Incident Overview
On October 10, 2024, a phishing attack led to the loss of $2.47 million in Aave Ethereum sDAI after a user unknowingly signed a malicious "permit" signature.
The victim signed a fraudulent "permit" transaction that allowed the scammer to gain control of the sDAI tokens. The scam involved temporary addresses pre-computed using the CREATE2 function, commonly used in phishing schemes to deceive victims into granting access to their assets.
Victim Address: 0xfcc5acd5…d403c2
Scammer Address: 0xAc68803B…67E7f2
Transaction Hash: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x64a00980…86454f
Incident Report
Protocol Information
What the Attacker Needed to Succeed
Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Phishing, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2024).
- Verify all logic paths related to Phishing are guarded by proper access controls and input validation - see the Phishing Attacks attack class for patterns
- Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
Free TrialRelated Attack Classes
The technique used in this hack maps to these vulnerability classes in our security curriculum:
Sources & References
Learn to Prevent the Next Phishing
The Phishing hack is one of many attacks that skilled auditors are trained to detect before deployment. Master real exploit patterns and defense techniques with hands-on Web3 security training.